It’s like when a basketball player enters “the zone” and can’t miss a shot because their muscle memory and mental focus are locked in sync - except in this case, the goal is to not shoot a damn thing. With gooning, however, the desire to orgasm “pretty much goes out the window,” Christfister explains. Edging, gooning’s close cousin, is a bit more time-consuming and involved, but it comes with the promise of a more powerful and gratifying ejaculation at the end. This, to be clear, is completely different from the regular ol’ wham-bam-thank-you-m’am whackoff you do when you’re mildly horny and trying to fall asleep. “It’s an almost hypnotic, semi-meditative mental state a person can enter after prolonged masturbation.” “Gooning is a sort of modernized version of tantric sex/masturbation without the spiritual aspects that have been traditionally associated with it in the past,” says Christfister, who moderates two of the many subreddits dedicated to the topic. Only then can an edger truly claim to be “ gooning. The ones who travel furthest for self-pleasure say that, if they edge long enough, they fall into a mind-numbing trance where nothing matters but nutting. Most of Reddit will tell you that edging is fantastic, but the real hardcore ’baters level up from there.
